Diva by Daisy Goodwin
Published by St. Martin's Press
Publication date: January 23, 2024
Genres: Fiction, Historical
Bookshop
I’ve loved celebrity and pop culture since I was a teen when I would beg my mother to buy me trashy magazines in the grocery store with the promise that I would pay her back (I’m still in arrears on that debt). So even though it played out back in the 1960s I was well aware of the scandal surrounding the relationship between American royalty Jackie Kennedy and Greek tycoon, Aristotle Onassis. I was too young to know who the other woman, Maria Callas, was in this sordid tale. And while I now know her to be an opera singer I knew nothing else of her life, so Daisy Goodwin’s Diva was an easy reading choice.
Callas was Greek by heritage but was actually born in America until her mother left her husband behind and took Maria and her sister Jackie back to Greece. It was 1938 and a case of spectacularly bad timing that left them struggling through the war and in the years afterward. Maria’s mother realized there was profit to be made from her daughter’s talent. This greed, combined with her preference for Maria’s older sister and emotional abuse of Maria, led Callas to become completely estranged from her family by the time she was an adult.
The damaging relationship with her mother was the foundation for several of the traits that came to define Callas as diva, including her punishing diet. Her weight and natural curves were something her mother had mocked mercilessly and so she became hypervigilant about calories. In an effort to find support Callas married a much older man who also acted as her manager. It wasn’t until she met Aristotle Onassis and he pursued her relentlessly that she understood passion, even as it came at a cost.
This is not a deep dive into Maria Callas’s voice, training, or extraordinary career. That’s best left to biographers. Goodwin spends most of Diva on Callas’s affair with Onassis and its implications in her life. The extraordinary control she exercised over her professional life was lessened by her love for a man who cared only for pleasure and had the money to indulge any whim. Despite being known worldwide as one of the greatest sopranos of all time Callas was uneducated and naïve to the ways of the world. She knew her voice to be a fleeting gift and longed to retire to the safety and security of marriage and family. Ultimately, she found neither.
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*I received a free copy of this book from St. Martin’s Press in exchange for an honest review.*
Is it true Callas died of a broken heart because Onassis left her for Jackie? It seems brutal. And her sister was named Jackie too? That’s a coincidence.
Ooo…I didn’t know that! I don’t think it’s true because the novel continues after Onassis leaves her, but I do think it destroyed her career.